White House Presses States To End Ebola Quarantine: Report

The Obama administration is pressuring New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) to reverse the mandatory quarantine for all health care workers who have treated Ebola patients, the New York Times reported Sunday.

One day after a doctor tested positive for the deadly virus in New York City, Cuomo and Christie announced a mandatory 21-day quarantine for any individual who has had contact with Ebola patients in Africa. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in contrast, recommends voluntary quarantines.

"It's too serious a situation to leave it to the honor system of compliance," Cuomo said of the decision.

According to the New York Times, the governors are now facing pushback from the White House:

Federal officials made it clear that they do not agree with the governors about the need or effectiveness of a total quarantine for health care workers, though they were careful not to directly criticize the governors themselves.

A senior administration official, who did not want to be identified in order to discuss private conversations with state officials on the issue, called the decision by the governors “uncoordinated, very hurried, an immediate reaction to the New York City case that doesn’t comport with science.”

On Sunday, the National Institute of Health's top Ebola specialist took to the morning public affairs programs to speak out on the quarantine. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned that such aggressive policies could deter health care workers from traveling to West Africa to curb the spread of Ebola, thus threatening public health globally.

"If you put everyone in one basket, even people who are clearly no threat, then we have the problem of the disincentive of people that we need," Fauci told ABC News. "Let’s not forget the best way to stop this epidemic and protect America is to stop it in Africa, and you can really help stopping it in Africa if we have our people, our heroes, the health care workers, go there and help us to protect America."

Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, made similar remarks on NBC's "Meet The Press."

Kaci Hickox, a nurse who treated Ebola patients in Sierra Leone, was quarantined Friday after flying into Newark Liberty Airport. In a Dallas Morning News op-ed and subsequent CNN interview, Hickox described being detained for hours in "a frenzy of disorganization" at the airport.

"This is an extreme that is really unacceptable, and I feel like my basic human rights have been violated," she told CNN. "To put me through this emotional and physical stress is completely unacceptable."

BEFORE YOU GO

1Ebola is highly infectious and even being in the same room as someone with the disease can put you at risk

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Not as far as we know. Ebola isn't contagious until symptoms begin, and it spreads through direct contact with the bodily fluids of patients. It is not, from what we know of the science so far, an airborne virus. So contact with the patient's sweat, blood, vomit, feces or semen could cause infection, and the body remains infectious after death. Much of the spread in west Africa has been attributed to the initial distrust of medical staff, leaving many to be treated at home by loved ones, poorly equipped medics catching the disease from patients, and the traditional burial rites involving manually washing of the dead body. From what we know already, you can't catch it from the air, you can't catch it from food, you can't catch it from water.

2You need to be worried if someone is sneezing or coughing hard

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Apart from the fact that sneezing and coughing aren't generally thought to be symptoms of Ebola, the disease is not airborne, so unless someone coughed their phlegm directly into your mouth, you wouldn't catch the disease. Though medical staff will take every precaution to avoid coming into contact with the body of an infected person at all costs, with stringent hygiene there should be a way to contain the virus if it reaches the UK.

3Cancelling all flights from west Africa would stop the spread of Ebola

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This actually has pretty serious implications. British Airways suspended its four-times-weekly flights to Liberia and Sierra Leone until the end of March, the only direct flight to the region from the UK. In practice, anyone can just change planes somewhere else and get to Britain from Europe, north Africa, or the Middle East. And aid agencies say that flight cancellations are hampering efforts to get the disease under control, they rely on commercial flights to get to the infected regions. Liberia's information minister, Lewis Brown, told the Telegraph this week that BA was putting more people in danger. "We need as many airlines coming in to this region as possible, because the cost of bringing in supplies and aid workers is becoming prohibitive," he told the Telegraph. "There just aren't enough seats on the planes. I can understand BA's initial reaction back in August, but they must remember this is a global fight now, not just a west African one, and we can't just be shut out." Christopher Stokes, director of MSF in Brussels, agreed: “Airlines have shut down many flights and the unintended consequence has been to slow and hamper the relief effort, paradoxically increasing the risk of this epidemic spreading across countries in west Africa first, then potentially elsewhere. We have to stop Ebola at source and this means we have to be able to go there.”

4Temperature screening at airports is an effective way to stop those who have the disease from travelling

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The screening process is pretty porous, especially when individuals want to subvert it. Wake up on the morning of your flight, feel a bit hot, and you definitely don't want to be sent to an isolation booth for days and have to miss your flight. Take an ibuprofen and you can lower your temperature enough to get past the scanners. And if you suspect you have Ebola, you might be desperate to leave, seeing how much better the treatment success has been in western nations. And experts have warned that you cannot expect people to be honest about who they have had contact with. Thomas Eric Duncan, the Ebola victim who died in Texas, told officials he had not been in contact with anyone with the disease, but had in fact visited someone in the late stages of the virus, though he said he believed it was malaria. The extra screening that the US implemented since his death probably wouldn't have singled out Duncan when he arrived from hard-hit Liberia last month, because he had no symptoms while travelling.

5Border staff should stop people coming in to the country who are at risk

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They're not doctors, and it's a monumental task to train 23,500 people who work for the UK Border Agency how to correctly diagnose a complex disease, and spot it in the millions of people who come through British transport hubs. Public Health England has provided UK Border Force with advice on the assessment of an unwell patient on entry to UK, but they can't be expected to check everyone.

6Screening at British airports should be implemented to stop unwell people coming in from affected areas

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As mentioned before, the UK, especially London, is a major transport hub. Unlike the US, most of those coming from west Africa will have crossed through Europe, so infected people could be coming from practically anywhere, not just flights directly from those countries. This would require the UK to screen every returning traveller, as people could return to the UK from an affected country through any port of entry. This would be huge numbers of low risk people, at vast, vast expense.

7Ebola doesn't have a cure

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There are several cures currently being tested for Ebola. They include the ZMapp vaccine which was administered to British sufferer William Pooley and two other Americans who caught the disease in west Africa and they all recovered. Supplies of the drug have now run dry, and it has not been through clinical trials to prove its effectiveness. Mapp Biopharmaceutical, the company that makes ZMapp, says the drug's supplies are exhausted and that it takes months to make even a small batch. But an Ebola cure is very much on the horizon, and would have come sooner had it been seen as any kind of priority for drug companies before it started reaching the western world.

8Ebola is a death sentence

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It is true that certain strains of Ebola have had a death rate of 90%. However, with this particular epidemic the stats are more positive, a death rate of around 60%. Those who have decent, strong immune systems, are able to access intravenous fluids and scrupulous health care are far more likely to survive, which is why the survival rate of westerners who contract the disease is far better. Experts have suggested that, rather than waste money on pointless airport screenings, funds could be used to improve infrastructure in the affected nations to help halt the spread of the disease at source.